Yojimbo to Tomboy Notes migration tool

I’m a huge fan of Bare Bones Software’s Yojimbo, an extremely useful tool for keeping information organised. It has been one of my most important applications since around 2008. I rely on Yojimbo as my ‘Anything Bucket‘ to save scraps of information, from code snippets and troubleshooting notes to project logs and research sources. A downside is that it’s only available for Apple Mac OS X and therefore was a factor in tying me to the Mac OS X platform.

When I started moving back to Linux for day-to-day development work, finding a Yojimbo replacement was a top priority. A colleague pointed me towards the GNOME project’s Tomboy application which runs on Linux, Unix, Windows, and Mac. Tomboy is a basic though perfectly usable cross-platform alternative but of course, I still needed to find a way of migrating my old Yojimbo notes.

Fortunately, Yojimbo has a sharing feature called Sidekick that exports your data to a set of web pages. Digging in to the Tomboy Note XML format showed me that Sidekick together with a bit of Python and some BeautifulSoup magic would provide a quick solution. I threw together pyYojimbo2Tomboy which I’m releasing under the The MIT License on GitHub in case anyone else needs it.

Keep in mind that Sidekick does not export the Yojimbo note metadata, like tags and modification times, but you can to migrate the title and note body over to Tomboy. Time permitting, I would like to find a way to save the extra metadata in a future version.

Though Bare Bones Software hasn’t released any updates and new features in a while, I still highly recommend Yojimbo for anyone on Mac OS X who needs an information organiser. It’s a little dated and doesn’t offer modern features you’d expect like an easy way to sync to the cloud and across devices. Personally, I find this one of Yojimbo’s strengths. An app in 2016 that doesn’t keep pestering you to push your information to some remote data centre with questionable privacy policies is somewhat refreshing.

Hopefully having a way to export data to a multi-platform open source alternative will reassure anyone worried about getting locked-in.